I send a semi-daily email delivering insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated. It is called The Heretic and here is the dispatch from 2015-10-26:

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MEETING HYGIENE

For the last couple of months I’ve spent way too much time in meetings. Anything from short check-ins to multi-hour strategy sessions. Often I find myself running from one meeting to the other.

The end result is that I regularly feel like I haven’t done anything productive during the day, am antsy in the meeting itself, have my mind wander and do way too many things at the same time (checking email while talking to someone is really not a good idea!).

My dear friend Daniel Epstein, founder and CEO of Unreasonable Group, recently shared his personal meeting hygiene formula with me — which I since then adopted with great success:

First take a minute (literally a minute) before each meeting and sit in silence, check in with yourself and get ready for the meeting. If you can — do this with all the other attendees and spend a minute to share out what is coming up for everyone. This is a wonderful way to get everyone on the same page.

Second: Simply refuse meetings without an agenda. No agenda — no meeting.

Third: Do your meetings walking around or standing (this one I do for a long while now). It does wonders for creativity, you get a bit of exercise in and meetings tend to be shorter.

All this means that I don’t have less meetings (sadly) — but at least my meetings are more productive and lead to better outcomes.